Comparative Study of Automatic Machine Translation VS Human Translation: A Case Study of Four Surah of Holy Quran

Abstract

Comparisons to human performance are often made in quite general and exaggerated terms. Thus, it is important to be able to account for differences accurately. This paper reports a simple, descriptive scheme for comparing translations, which is applied to four Surahs of the Holy Quran and compares the human translation with machine translation. The method applied for the study is qualitative. Within the qualitative domains, one of the four methods of assessment of translation has been adopted from Waddington (2001). The analysis is done on four parameters namely textual, syntactic, semantic, and social. The results obtained from the data confirm that human translation is far better and superior in comparison with the machine translation as human translation almost covers the four above-mentioned aspects. On the other hand, machine translation lacks and misses many important levels of translation and does not convey the true spirit of meaning from one language to another language. However, machine translation is quicker and faster as compared to human translation. It is concluded that machine translation is not as reliable, trustworthy, and dependable as human translation. This study has a future prospect for further studies with some limitations of human translation.